Only two years after the catastrophic earthquake that almost destroyed the island of Haiti, killing many (200,000 is one estimate) and leaving more homeless, it would not…
Author: Dean Swift
‘Dean Swift’ is a pen name: the author has been a soldier; he has worked in sales, TV, the making of films, as a teacher of English and history and a journalist. He is married with three grown-up children. They live in Spain.
What was ‘Apartheid’?
The word itself is Afrikaans or South African Dutch and means ‘separateness’. In the 50s of the last century a morbid joking pun was made…
Civilization 2013
The science of allowing mankind to live in its immediate society as free, courteous, unselfish, educated and rational individuals is called civilization. It is a science that has…
Monarchist Republics (or Republican Monarchies)
At first sight our title might seem a misnomer, rather like ‘Benevolent Dictator’ or ‘Historical Novel’. But one was set up and lasted for eight years in…
Heydrich and the massacre at Lidice
My new wife and I settled into our new home in a country lane at Santa Úrsula on the island of Tenerife in 1980. In a small cottage…
Who was Florence Nightingale?
Sufficiently immortal in England’s history to appear in 1066 And All That under the comic names of ‘Florence MacNightingown’ and even ‘Florence MacNightshade’, she was the…
America’s Supreme Court
Most developed countries have a Supreme Court, which means what it says.* It is the maximum legal authority a third branch of the government, independent however of the…
The Terror in France (1792 – 4)
A crucial moment arrived in France when the much-sought revolution seemed to be petering out. Those who had staked everything on it, their fortune, their families, properties…
Charles M. Talleyrand-Périgord (‘Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy as to arrange the facts.’
The French statesman was born in 1754 with a club-foot, a piece of bad luck he shared with Kaiser Wilhelm II and Lord Byron. None of the three…
Caustic Congresses III: the Peace of Utrecht (1713)
Of all the peace conferences that turned caustic almost at the moment of signing, the Peace of Utrecht which ‘ended’ the War of the Spanish Succession (q.v.)…